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"How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?" No other question can better define the loyalty of a company's customers than this one, according to Fred Reichheld's best seller, "The Ultimate Question." Reichheld, a fellow with the consulting firm Bain & Company, used the answer to this question to help understand which customers were enthusiastic about a company, which were satisfied but unenthusiastic, and which customers were unhappy.

Companies with the most loyal customers (Promoters) and fewest unsatisfied customers (Detractors) are creating "good profits." These are generally the most profitable in their category, according to Reichheld. These are also the companiessuch as Apple, Canon, and Garminfrom whom we feel our readers will want to purchase products and services.

For years, PCMag has asked readers how likely they would be to recommend a company and we've used this measure as an important factor in determining which companies were our Readers' Choice winners in their respective categories. We now present the answer to that question as both an average and a Net Promoter Score (NPS), which measures brand loyalty.

Calculating NPS is very straightforward. We ask the recommendation question on a 0 to 10 scale where 10 is best. We break the answers down into three groups according to the methodology's definitions:

 Promoters (score 9 or 10): loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and refer others
 Passives (score 7 or 8): satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who are vulnerable to competitive offerings
 Detractors (score 0 to 6): unhappy customers who can damage the brand and impede growth through negative word-of-mouth

We then subtract the percent of detractors from the percent of promoters: Promoters percent - Detractors percent = NPS.

So, for instance, 82 percent of those who responded about Samsung HDTVs are Promoters and 4 percent are Detractors, so the company has a 78 percent NPS. Westinghouse, on the other hand, has far fewer Promoters (31 percent) and a lot more Detractors (32 percent) for a -1 percent NPS.